Why
pay for a museum ticket or a doctor when you can just walk down the aisle of your local
grocery store? Your favorite snacks often have a rich history, from soda (or
"pop," as they say in the Midwest) to the breakfast cereal you wake
up to every morning. And whether by accident or on purpose, marketing and
medicine were sometimes one and the same in some of the less science-centric
stretches of history. Here are the surprising medical origins of some of the
foods and beverages you'll find on supermarket shelves.
Graham Crackers and Corn Flakes
Graham
crackers used to be no s'more than a bland snack. Far from the
honey- and sugar-coated confection we know today, the original was invented by Sylvester
Graham, a Presbyterian minister. Why? To combat immorality. He created the
cracker in 1829 to help people follow the Graham Diet,
a bland food regimen that supposedly stopped people from having sexual
thoughts. Thousands of "Grahamites" adhered to this diet as
part of one of the first vegetarian movements in the country, but the fad's
popularity waned after Graham's death in 1851.
However,
one Grahamite remained vigilant: Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. In 1876, he was the superintendent of
the Seventh-day Adventist Western Health Reform Institute, later named the
Battle Creek Sanitarium. He and his brother, Will Keith Kellogg, the sanitarium's
bookkeeper, accidentally invented corn flakes — wheat flakes, really — when
they overcooked wheat for bread dough and
decided to process it anyway. The individual wheat berries rolled easily into
flat, wide flakes, which baked into a crispy final product. Dr. Kellogg prescribed
it as part of the Graham diet, claiming it would reduce dyspepsia and "morally destructive" behaviors.
His younger brother Will had more of an entrepreneurial spirit and decided to
try his recipe with corn, add some sugar, and put it on the market. The rest is history.
Salisbury Steak
Could
you imagine eating just one type of food for several days straight? Beginning
in 1854, Dr. James Henry Salisbury did
this multiple times in experiments — for about 30 years. He felt that certain
foods could cure illness and lead to lasting health, so why not live on one
food at a time to better measure its full effects? One of his first experiments
was living solely on baked beans for three days. Just let that one sink in for
a minute. Another time, he and some volunteers lived on oatmeal and porridge
for 30 days.
Salisbury
referred to this research when he published The Relation of Alimentation and Disease in
1888. In it, he prescribed what is now known as Salisbury steak as a remedy for
patients suffering from conditions like anemia, colitis, gout, rheumatism, and
tuberculosis. He believed that his recipe, which was to be eaten
three times a day along with plenty of hot water to rinse out the digestive
system, was the most easily digested food — and it was an instant sensation.
Who would have thought that your TV dinner started out as a popular diet fad?
Soft Drinks
Believe
it or not, 7-Up, Dr Pepper, and Coca-Cola were all originally formulated to serve a medical purpose.
7-Up was the most legit of the bunch, as it literally was a mood-stabilizing
drink. That's because it contained lithium citrate ,
the same compound used to treat psychiatric conditions. It was introduced in
1929 with the extremely catchy name "Bib-Label
Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda," and the lithium wasn't removed until
1950. Dr Pepper, the oldest major soft drink in
the U.S., had fewer legitimate medical applications (i.e., none), but was
nonetheless originally marketed as an energy drink and a "brain
tonic." Dr Pepper was developed by pharmacist Charles Alderton in 1885 and
was first available for purchase at a drug store in Waco, Texas.
Just
a year later in 1886, Coca-Cola was invented by another pharmacist, John
Pemberton. He had previously developed a drink called "Pemberton's French Wine Coca", a
fortified wine that contained caffeine-rich kola nuts and, oh yeah, cocaine.
He claimed it could cure everything from
nerve trouble to exhaustion to impotence. The drink became illegal due to local
prohibition laws outlawing alcohol (the cocaine was perfectly acceptable, of
course), so he used sugar syrup to develop a non-alcoholic version and called
it Coca-Cola.
The
drink exploded in popularity only after Pemberton's death in
1888, at which point Coca-Cola Company founder Asa Griggs Candler bought the
rights & marketed it as a
"tonic and headache remedy." Today, the secret recipe lives in a vault at
The World of Coke in Atlanta.
(curiosity.com)
(curiosity.com)
